Wagner: Rienzi, WWV 49

Introduction

Rienzi, der letzte der Tribunen (Rienzi, the last of the tribunes; WWV 49) is an early opera by Richard Wagner in five acts, with the libretto written by the composer after Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel of the same name (1835). The title is commonly shortened to Rienzi. Written between July 1838 and November 1840, it was first performed at the Königliches Hoftheater, Dresden, on 20 October 1842, and was the composer's first success.

The opera is set in Rome and is based on the life of Cola di Rienzi (1313–1354), a late medieval Italian populist figure who succeeds in outwitting and then defeating the nobles and their followers and in raising the power of the people. Magnanimous at first, he is forced by events to crush the nobles' rebellion against the people's power, but popular opinion changes and even the Church, which had urged him to assert himself, turns against him. In the end the populace burns the Capitol, in which Rienzi and a few adherents have made a last stand.

Composition history

Rienzi is Wagner's third completed opera, and is mostly written in a grand opera style; depictions of the mob, the liberal ethos associated with the hero and the political intervention of a reactionary clergy recall La vestale, Les Huguenots, and also Fromental Halévy's La Juive. Each act ends with an extended finale ensemble and is replete with solos, duets, trios and crowd scenes. There is also an extended ballet in act 2 according to the accepted Grand Opera format. Hans von Bülow was later to joke that "Rienzi is Meyerbeer's best opera".

Wagner began to draft the opera in Riga in 1837, after reading Lytton's novel. In 1839, meeting Meyerbeer by chance in Boulogne, he was able to read the latter the first three acts of the libretto, and to gain his interest. Meyerbeer also introduced Wagner to Ignaz Moscheles, who was also staying at Boulogne; as Ernest Newman comments, this was "Wagner's first meeting with real international musical celebrities". When the opera was completed in 1840, Wagner had hoped for it to be premiered at the Paris Opéra.

Several circumstances, including his lack of influence, prevented this. Moreover, Wagner's wife Minna, in a letter of 28 October 1840 to Wagner's friend Apel, who had likely first made the suggestion that Wagner compose Rienzi, mentions a plan to perform the overture to Rienzi "a fortnight hence", but contains a clear indication that her husband had just been committed to a debtors' prison. The full score of Rienzi was completed on 19 November 1840.

In 1841 Wagner moved to Meudon, just outside Paris, where the debt laws could be more easily evaded, whilst awaiting developments for Rienzi, having already written to King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony, requesting that he order a production of the work in Dresden.

With the support of Meyerbeer, a staging of Rienzi was arranged in Dresden; Meyerbeer wrote to the Director of the Opera in Dresden, Baron von Lüttichau, that he found the opera "rich in fantasy and of great dramatic effect". This, with the proposed staging of The Flying Dutchman in Berlin, also supported by Meyerbeer, persuaded Wagner to return to Germany in April 1842. During rehearsals the performers were highly enthusiastic; the tenor Tichatschek, in the title role, was so impressed with a passage from act 3 (later deleted because of the opera's length), that 'at each rehearsal, each of the soloists contributed a silver groschen to [a] fund that Tichatschek had started ... No one suspected that what was an amiable joke for them was the means of buying [Wagner] an extra morsel of sorely-needed food'.

The premiere of Rienzi took place on 20 October 1842 in the new Dresden Opera House, designed by the architect Gottfried Semper and opened the previous year. Semper and Wagner were later to become friends in Dresden, a connection which eventually led to Semper providing designs which became a basis of Wagner's Festspielhaus in Bayreuth.

The first performance of Rienzi was well received in Dresden despite running over six hours (including intermissions). One legend is that, fearful of the audience departing, Wagner stopped the clock above the stage. In his later memoirs, Mein Leben, Wagner recalled:

No subsequent experience has given me feelings even remotely similar to those I had on this day of the first performance of Rienzi. The only too well-founded anxiety as to their success has so dominated my feelings at all subsequent first performances of my works that I could never really enjoy them or take much notice of the way the audience was behaving.[...] The initial success of Rienzi was no doubt assured beforehand. But the uproarious way in which the public declared its partiality for me was extraordinary ... The public had been forcibly predisposed to accept it, because everyone connected with the theatre had been spreading such favourable reports ... that the entire population was looking forward to what was heralded as a miracle ... In trying to recall my condition that evening, I can remember it only as possessing all the features of a dream.

Subsequently, Wagner experimented with giving the opera over two evenings (at the suggestion of von Lüttichau), and making cuts to enable a more reasonable performance in a single evening.

Performance history

Despite Wagner's reservations, Rienzi remained one of his most successful operas until the early 20th century. In Dresden alone, it reached its 100th performance in 1873 and 200th in 1908 and it was regularly performed throughout the 19th century in major opera houses throughout Europe and beyond, including those in America and England in 1878/9. The Paris premiere of Rienzi finally took place on 6 April 1869 at the Théâtre Lyrique under the baton of Jules Pasdeloup. The US premiere took place on 4 March 1878 at the Academy of Music in New York and was followed on 27 January 1879 by the first UK performance at Her Majesty's Theatre in London. The overture was the first work performed at the inaugural Henry Wood Promenade Concert at the Queen's Hall in London in August 1895.

A staging at the English National Opera in London, produced by Nicholas Hytner in 1983, placed the hero in the context of 20th-century totalitarianism. A production by David Pountney at the Vienna State Opera in 1999 set the work in the "near future". Of this production Pountney wrote:

Wagner invested the musical realization of Rienzi with the unashamed extravagance and tasteless exaggeration of a Las Vegas hotel ... only the self-consciously deliberate and unabashed use of kitsch could match this musical egomania.

Other contemporary productions have been rare. Performances were given at the Theater Bremen in April/May 2009 and at the Deutsche Oper Berlin and Oper Leipzig in April/May 2010. In July 2013, the bicentennial year of Wagner's birth, performances of all three of Wagner's early operas, including Rienzi, took place for the first time at Bayreuth, at the Oberfrankenhalle. This performance trimmed some parts, including the second-act ballet. The Australian premiere was a concert performance by Melbourne Opera in December 2013, as part of the bicentennial celebrations.

Roles

Synopsis

Overture

The opera opens with a substantial overture which begins with a trumpet call (which in act 3 we learn is the war call of the Colonna family) and features the melody of Rienzi's prayer at the start of act 5, which became the opera's best-known aria. The overture ends with a military march.

Act 1

Outside Rienzi's house

The patrician Orsini and his cronies attempt to kidnap Rienzi's sister Irene. Stefano Colonna, also a patrician but inclined to support Rienzi, prevents them. Raimondo appeals to the parties in the name of the Church to stop their fighting; Rienzi's eventual appearance (marked by a dramatic key shift, from D to E flat) quells the riot. The Roman people support Rienzi's condemnation of the nobles. Irene and Adriano realise their mutual attraction (duet Ja, eine Welt voll Leiden (Yes, a world of sorrows)). A gathering crowd of plebeians, inspired by Rienzi's speeches, offers Rienzi the crown; he demurs, insisting that he wishes only to be a Tribune of the Roman people.

Act 2

A hall in the Capitol

The patricians plot the death of Rienzi; Adriano is horrified when he learns of this. Rienzi greets a group of ambassadors for whom an entertainment is laid on (a lengthy ballet). Orsini attempts to stab Rienzi, who however is protected by a vest of chainmail. Adriano pleads with Rienzi for mercy to the nobles, which Rienzi grants.

The act 2 ballet is noteworthy as Wagner made a clear attempt to make it relevant to the action of the opera (whereas in most Grand Operas the ballet was simply an entertaining diversion). The Rienzi ballet was intended to tell the tale of the 'Rape of Lucretia'. This storyline (in which Tarquinius, the last king of Rome, attempts to rape the virtuous Lucretia), parallels both the action of Rienzi (Orsini's attempt on Irene) and its background (patricians versus the people). In its original form the ballet lasts for over half an hour – in modern performances and recordings it is generally drastically cut.

Act 3

The Roman Forum

The patricians have recruited an army to march on Rome. The people are alarmed. Rienzi rouses the people and leads them to victory over the nobles, in the course of which Adriano's father Stefano is killed. Adriano swears revenge, but Rienzi dismisses him.

Act 4

Before the Lateran Church

Cecco and other citizens discuss the negotiations of the patricians with the Pope and with the Emperor of Germany. Adriano's intention to kill Rienzi wavers when Rienzi arrives together with Irene. Raimondo now announces that the Pope has laid a papal ban on Rienzi, and that his associates risk excommunication. Despite Adriano's urgings, Irene resolves to stay with Rienzi.

Act 5

Scene 1: A room in the Capitol

Rienzi in his prayer Allmächt’ger Vater (Almighty Father!) asserts his faith in the people of Rome. He suggests to Irene that she seeks safety with Adriano, but she demurs. An apologetic Adriano enters and tells the pair that the Capitol is to be burnt and they are at risk.

Scene 2: The Capitol is ablaze

Rienzi's attempts to speak are met with stones and insults from the fickle crowd. Adriano, in trying to rescue Rienzi and Irene, is killed with them as the building collapses.

In the original performances, Rienzi's final words are bitter and pessimistic: "May the town be accursed and destroyed! Disintegrate and wither, Rome! Your degenerate people wish it so." However for the 1847 Berlin performance Wagner substituted a more upbeat rhetoric: "Ever while the seven hills of Rome remain, ever while the eternal city stands, you will see Rienzi's return!".

Reception and performances

Wagner later perceived Rienzi as an embarrassment; in his 1852 autobiographical essay, A Communication to My Friends, he wrote "I saw it only in the shape of 'five acts', with five brilliant 'finales', with hymns, processions and the musical clash of arms". Cosima Wagner recorded Wagner's comment in her diary for 20 June 1871:

Rienzi is very repugnant to me, but they should at least recognize the fire in it; I was a music director and I wrote a grand opera; the fact that it was this same music director who gave them some hard nuts to crack – that's what should astonish them.

Thus the work has remained outside today's Wagner canon, and was only performed at the Bayreuth Festival in 2013, staged by Matthias von Stegmann. Although the composer disclaimed it, it can be noted that Rienzi prefigures themes (brother/sister relationships, social order and revolution) to which Wagner was often to return in his later works.

The success of Rienzi – his first real success of any kind – was crucial in Wagner's career, launching him as a composer to be reckoned with. It was followed, within months, by his appointment as Kapellmeister at the Dresden Opera (February 1843), which also gave him considerable prestige. It also received critical acclaim elsewhere in Europe. The young Eduard Hanslick, later to be one of Wagner's foremost critical adversaries, wrote in 1846 in Vienna:

I am of the firm opinion that [Rienzi] is the finest thing achieved in grand opera in the last twelve years, that it is the most significant dramatic creation since Les Huguenots, and that it is just as epoch-making for its own time as were Les Huguenots, Der Freischütz, and Don Giovanni, each for its respective period of musical history

Other critical comments though the ages have included (apart from von Bulow's jibe about it being 'Meyerbeer's best opera'), 'Meyerbeer's worst opera' (Charles Rosen), 'an attack of musical measles' (Ernest Newman) and ' the greatest musical drama ever composed' (Gustav Mahler).

Franz Liszt wrote a Fantasy on themes from Rienzi (S. 439) for piano in 1859.

Rienzi and Adolf Hitler

August Kubizek, a boyhood friend of Adolf Hitler, claimed that Hitler was so influenced by seeing Rienzi as a young man in 1906 or 1907 that it triggered his political career, and that when Kubizek reminded Hitler, in 1939 at Bayreuth, of his exultant response to the opera Hitler had replied, "At that hour it all began!" Although Kubizek's veracity has been seriously questioned, it is known that Hitler possessed the original manuscript of the opera, which he had requested and been given as a fiftieth birthday present in 1939. The manuscript was with Hitler in his bunker; it was either stolen, lost or destroyed by fire in the destruction of the bunker's contents after Hitler's death (the manuscript of Wagner's earlier work Die Feen is believed to have met with the same fate). Thomas Grey comments:

In every step of Rienzi's career – from ... acclamation as leader of the Volk, through military struggle, violent suppression of mutinous factions, betrayal and ... final immolation – Hitler would doubtless have found sustenance for his fantasies.

Albert Speer claims to have remembered an incident when Robert Ley advocated using a modern composition to open the Party Rallies in Nuremberg, but Hitler rejected this idea:

"You know, Ley, it isn't by chance that I have the Party Rallies open with the overture to Rienzi. It's not just a musical question. At the age of twenty-four this man, an innkeeper's son, persuaded the Roman people to drive out the corrupt Senate by reminding them of the magnificent past of the Roman Empire. Listening to this blessed music as a young man in the theater at Linz, I had the vision that I too must someday succeed in uniting the German Empire and making it great once more."

Editions

The original performance version of Rienzi was lost in the Dresden bombing of 1945, and the manuscript (on which it had been based) was lost in Berlin in 1945. No full copies had been made of either version, as far as is known. However, Rienzi was never established by the composer into a finalized version, so all performances of it since 1945 have been reconstructions.

A vocal score of the early 1840s, based on Wagner's draft, remains as the only existing primary source. Two surviving full scores made in Dresden in the early 1840s (under Wagner's supervision) already reflect the heavy cuts made in performances. The first printed score that was made under Wagner's supervision in 1844 reflects even heavier cuts.

A critical edition of the opera was prepared by Schott's in Mainz in 1976 as volume III of their scholarly complete edition of Wagner's works. This edition was edited by Wagner scholars Reinhard Strohm and Egon Voss; it uses the extant sources but also contains the 1844 piano version prepared by Gustav Klink, (which includes some of the passages excised from early performances).

Overall it is not possible to accurately reconstruct Wagner's "original" Rienzi, but Rienzi on the other hand was clearly never finished by the composer. It was constantly being altered during the 1840s (and, it seems, possibly throughout Wagner's lifetime), so it is not feasible to fully determine Wagner's exact or final intentions based on existing evidence.